A couple of weeks back I wrote about controversy over the renaming of the South African town of Louis Trichardt. It seemed obvious to me that a country that had so long seen the majority population trampled under the foot of the white minority ought to have the fairly fundamental right to reclaim the naming […]
Over at the Council on Foreign relations website Francis Kornegay, a senior researcher at the Center for Policy Studies in Johannesburg, and Tom Wheeler, a research fellow at the South African Institute of International Affairs, discuss whether South Africa is living up to its responsibility as Africa's leader in an edifying exchange. Meanwhile other observers […]
One of the biggest problems that African policymakers face is the risk of being reduced to one or two usually failing policies. The majority of Americans pay Africa virtually no heed as it is, and so complexity gets lost in favor of simple, and thus simplistic, renderings of African leaders. Ask even educated Americans (or, […]
Philip Gourevitch has a fine piece in the latest New Yorker about the plight of Zimbabwe. There is not a lot that will be new to readers of this blog, but it provides a nice summary of Mugabe's treachery and South Africa's laissez faire response.
In some ways these ought to be salad days for Thabo Mbeki and South Africa. The country's continued growth rate has been in the black for something like one hundred straight months, a claim that few countries in the world can stake. South Africa, already arguably Africa's hottest tourist destination, is poised to show the […]
Thabo Mbeki is worried that eleven months is not enough time to provide a climate for Zimbabwe to hold free and fair elections. SADC appointed Mbeki to serve as mediator between Robert Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF, which put the old tyrant up as the party's candidate to serve another term in office, and the Movement for […]
One of the many reasons why Africa ought to matter more to the United States than it does is because it will continue to provide an important source of oil imports. This week Slate has been running four excerpts from John Ghazvinian's book Untapped: The Scramble For Africa's Oil. The excerpts include: Does Africa Measure […]
Thabo Mbeki, whom leaders of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) appointed to act as mediator between Mugabe and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) when it held its summit in Tanzania last week, appears remarkably sanguine about the crisis in Zimbabwe, all in all. In a recent interview Mbeki, when asked if he […]
Can good governance be encouraged through financial incentives? Sudanese businessman Mo Ibrahim believes it can be and he has established a prize in his name to do so. Former United Nations chief Kofi Annan will head the committee making the award, which “will go to former presidents and prime ministers from sub-Saharan Africa who left […]
In what has to be among the most disappointing news from southern Africa in a long time, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) has chosen to acquiesce to Robert Mugabe's rule. A meeting that beforehand was hailed as preparing to take a stance against a regional despot instead ended up asking "The West" to ease […]
One of the mandates of the New South Africa was to try to Africanize many of the names of places and institutions. After all, in that predominantly African country, why would the new, non-racial democracy want to perpetuate the names of the heroes of the white regime, the very people who had disfranchised Africans, who had […]
The New York Times has a feature on the Democratic Republic of the Congo's adjustment to its election six months ago. Not surprisingly, a half a year has not done much to overcome decades of misrule. Congo has long stood as the emblematic example of African chaos. It is far too early to be optimistic about […]
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